AgriGuide Newsletter – September 2025

AgriGuide Newsletter #11 – August-September 2025

Dear Readers,

What a productive two months it has been for AgriGuide. Even through the holiday period, our team has pushed forward at pace — digitising reference labels, delivering tangible technical upgrades to the app, and turning the practical insight from country working groups into real progress. We’re in a busy, but exciting phase: scaling out, onboarding new countries and continually refining both platform and app to better serve farmers on the ground.

AgriGuide at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit 

Presenting AgriGuide at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit
We were thrilled to represent AgriGuide at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit in London 22–23 September, one of Europe’s leading events for driving a more resilient and innovative food-system. The summit brought together farmers, agribusinesses, investors, policymakers and tech leaders, making it an ideal place to showcase how AgriGuide supports farmers in practice.

Having a stand allowed us to catch-up with friends of the project, members of the CropLife Europe community and introduce AgriGuide to new contacts. Demonstrating the app in person — scanning containers and bringing up the digital label immediately— really showed how far we’ve come and sparked some great conversations about real-world use and next steps.

We left the summit energised by the interest and ideas shared. Thank you to everyone who stopped by the stand; we’re looking forward to building on these conversations and continuing to progress towards a more resilient, digital and user-focused future for farming.

Impression of our stand at the World Agri-Tech Innovation Summit, 22-23 September

Meet the Team!

A new section to our newsletter to get introduced to the people who are part of our AgriGuide Project sub-team.

1. What’s your role within AgriGuide?

I’m part of the Sub Team wherein I represent the national associations and I’m involved in the Transformation Office and Rollout Coordination. Alongside colleagues from France and Germany, my job is to be the bridge between the associations in the member countries and the wider AgriGuide project. That means keeping an open dialogue both ways: bringing national needs and constraints into the project and helping national associations understand and act on what the project asks of them.

I also bring experience from the Netherlands — we already have a database with digitalised labels— so I push for re-use and pragmatic solutions rather than redoing work from scratch. A big part of my day-to-day is thinking about how the system can be made truly useful for farmers, with simple scanning and clear application guidance. 

2. What do you find most rewarding being part of AgriGuide? 

For me it’s the human side: the interplay between people, interests and organisations. I get energy from finding common ground between stakeholders and from seeing something concrete emerge from that collective effort. There’s great satisfaction in knowing we’re building a practical tool that will be actually used in the field. 

3. How do you envision AgriGuide two years from now? 

In two years, I hope to see countries with fully functioning, living databases and clear governance for keeping data up to date. AgriGuide will be embedded in routine processes as new way of working — not a time-limited project. The crucial piece is sustainability: companies must have procedures to update digital labels whenever regulations or product information change, and quality checks must be routine. If we keep the focus on data quality, completeness interoperability and farmer usability we will have laid the foundation for cross-border, practical use that truly benefits farmers. 

4. What is your favourite way to unwind after a busy day at work? 

No need to think twice – for me it’s music. I play in a band, called Almost Blue, and nothing clears my head like singing and picking up the guitar, harmonica or occasionally the trombone. Making music with friends is a different kind of teamwork: immediate, joyful and utterly restorative. Playing at local events and care homes is especially rewarding — those small shared moments remind me why bringing people together matters. That energy feeds back into my AgriGuide work, so watch this space — you might hear more from us soon! 

5. What is the most valuable lesson AgriGuide has taught you so far? 

Always keep the end-user in mind. We can get lost in technicalities and detailed data modelling, but the ultimate goal for AgriGuide is to help farmers in practice. Regularly ‘zooming out’ to ask “what are we doing this for?” helps to prioritise work, keep momentum and align technical solutions with operational reality. 

AgriGuide ST Meeting 

Steering Ahead – AgriGuide on course for 2026
It was a great pleasure to reconvene with the Sub Team in Brussels on 1 October for a thorough progress review — a productive session that confirmed strong momentum across the project. Highlights include: 

❖ Steady digitisation rollout — Great progress is being made as we see more than 400 labels published across 17 countries and the count is growing. 

❖ Product Catalogue — data source review done and first datasets due soon. 

❖ Simple Application Record (SAppR) — 80% complete and on track for a January 2026 launch as a free, user-friendly digital record-keeping tool for farmers. 

Read more about these developments in next columns of this newsletter. 

From the Technical Corner 

Multiple technical streams running in parallel
This is a very busy period for us, with work package 1 (WP1) focused on scaling out, onboarding countries and evolving the platform and app. Country working groups are helping us to prioritise updates and to find harmonised approaches where possible. The latest tech developments have improved the user experience for language handling and adapting the app for longer phrases in label subsections (or “tiles”). 

Update on work package 1.5 – Simple Application Record keeping and more
In parallel we have a second work package (WP1.5) developing four areas. Integration points with label authoring tools and with consumers of our data, initially reference term. A product catalogue for each country, with a list of available products linked into AgriGuide’s reference data. An overview of data sources by country and initial catalogues for Ireland and Germany due next week to support the record keeping feature development. 

The simple application record functionality will offer an intuitive, basic tool for farmers to record their pesticide use in alignment with regulation EU 2023/564. In September, we used feedback from a prototype to finalise the “user journey”, the steps that farmers need to take to record their application, and how the information will be stored. The development has started and is due to deliver a first version for testing next month. 

Digitisation Webinars
To support the whole project with this digital transformation we ae undertaking, we are running a series of digitisation webinars, with the latest in September giving a general project and app update, then diving into machine readability and why it’s so important for agritech software. 170 participants joined, making it a lively and successful session! 

Some snippets from the Digitisation Webinar 26th September

Country Roll-Out 

Country roll-out progress
The AgriGuide roll-out continues to gain momentum, with several countries advancing through publication and quality cycles. Notable achievements this period include multiple sample labels published and several countries, including the Portugal, Baltics, Croatia, Slovenia and Poland, progressing into Phase 3. This demonstrates the growing maturity of the programme across regions.

Next steps
Priority actions include publishing remaining sample labels, resolving a few outstanding technical issues, accelerating digitisation where category mapping holds progress. Continued collaboration between country teams, Molecular Connections and Tech Pillar will be essential to sustain this positive trajectory and achieve the next wave of roll-out milestones. 

What’s Next

AgriGuide will be on the road this autumn — here’s anoverview of where you can catch us.

15 October 2025 — Agritech Day, Clermont-Ferrand, France
Agritech day is an annual international conference hosted by AXEMA, dedicated to showcasing the latest technologies and solutions for efficient and sustainable agriculture. The one-day event features plenary sessions, thematic presentations and a live industrial site visit, offering opportunities to discover developments in agricultural machinery. On this 8th Agritech Day edition, AgriGuide will be presented with a demo.

28–29 October 2025 — Fresenius Conference on Digital Agriculture, Düsseldorf
This conference explores the regulatory and scientific aspects of precision application, aiming to support compliant development of risk-assessment and risk-management tools for digital farming. AgriGuide will be presented and discussed in the context of precision application and regulatory compliance. If you’re not able to join the conference in person, a live-stream will be available.

14 November 2025 — Agritechnica, Hannover
Agritechnica is the world’s leading trade fair for agricultural machinery, bringing together global players, innovators and visionaries to showcase solutions to the challenges of global crop production. Under the theme ‘Touch Smart Efficiency’, Agritechnica2025 provides direct access to innovative, networked agricultural systems that harness digital technologies to enhance efficiency, sustainability and productivity. If you’re visiting, we welcome you to join our presentation and find out more about AgriGuide!